5 ms·

For years I've thought about doing an "art project" to make people more aware of the fact they are being observed – but I never actually got up and did it. The

by fainpul 10mo ago

For years I've thought about doing an "art project" to make people more aware of the fact they are being observed – but I never actually got up and did it. The idea was to seek spots in the city where public web cams are pointed at, and paint QR codes on the ground at those spots (using a template), linking to the camera stream. So when curious passerbys scan the code, they see themselves in a camera stream and feel "watched".

jdthedisciple 10mo ago
What, are those streams publicly accessible? I'm only aware of boring rooftop weather webcams where obv you can't see yourself. Any examples for what you speak of?
- peaseagee 10mo ago
  Many are! I live in NY and 511ny.org has a great view of all traffic cams in the state (and some beyond it, but I don't understand how they got on the list...)
  - maccard 10mo ago
    https://trafficcamphotobooth.com/ https://trafficcamphotobooth.com/ You can even take a selfie with them!
- gs17 10mo ago
  Some places have them available. For example, every highway camera in California (and in some places like Oakland there's plenty of cameras that show crosswalks): https://cwwp2.dot.ca.gov/vm/iframemap.htm https://cwwp2.dot.ca.gov/vm/iframemap.htm Quality isn't great, but you could likely see yourself recognizably.
- fainpul 10mo ago
  I don't mean these Flock cameras, I mean what you refer to as "boring rooftop weather webcams". Some of those show people fairly close up and even if you can't recognize your face in the stream, you will recognize the place and realize that it's you, standing there right now in that video stream. Just search for "<your city> webcam" and see what you can find.
FelipeCortez 10mo ago
I remember seeing an art project in the UK ~10 years ago where they had actors enact a short film but everything was filmed using street cameras, which IIRC everyone could request access to with little bureaucracy.
- FelipeCortez 10mo ago
  found it! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faceless_(2007_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faceless_(2007_film)
  - rcxdude 10mo ago
    I remember a music video with the same premise: https://youtube.com/watch?v=W2iuZMEEs_A https://youtube.com/watch?v=W2iuZMEEs_A
geoffeg 10mo ago
Could use projectors to display the feed directly onto the ground or a building wall, in some ways that may be more impactful. You'd have to stay with the projector and power source, but easier to move to the next location, and less of a chance of getting in trouble for defacing public property, etc.
rvloock 10mo ago
Belgian artist Dries Depoorter has something that comes close, where he tried to match public webcams against Instagram photos. See https://driesdepoorter.be/thefollower https://driesdepoorter.be/thefollower .
p_ing 10mo ago
I had thought about creating a larger roadside banner with the faces (pulled from voters guide) of the city council members who approved Flock, along with the face of the Sheriff with something along the lines of "These people want to know where your wife and daughter are at all times - deflock.me" and place it right next to the Flock camera. Gotta tag some political organization on the banner which makes it illegal to remove.
- arijun 10mo ago
  I wonder if it’s legal to modify the images to look more sinister. Otherwise, someone passing by might not read the text, making it free advertising for council/sherrif.
  - afavour 10mo ago
    Feels like a dishonest approach, to be honest.
- edot 10mo ago
  The issue is, a lot of people wouldn’t mind the sheriff knowing where their wife and daughter are at all times. What if one of them gets kidnapped? It would be good if law enforcement could track them. That’s the logic some people have …
  - IAmBroom 10mo ago
    It's not illogical to say that more cameras would lead to more arrests of kidnappers, and other violent criminals. I don't think many of us would object to video surveillance actually doing that. So, it's not even an immoral thought to many of us. The problem is LE using it for almost any other purpose whatsoever.
    - ejplatzer 10mo ago
      This would be a potential point of conversation if the research didn't show that more ALPRs doesn't lead to reduced crime or more arrests - except in the very narrow slice of automotive theft.
allenu 10mo ago
Not exactly the same, but Massive Attack had some facial recognition software running in the background during a concert to illustrate how pervasive modern day surveillance is: https://petapixel.com/2025/09/17/band-massive-attack-uses-live-facial-recognition-on-audience-in-powerful-critique-of-technology/ https://petapixel.com/2025/09/17/band-massive-attack-uses-li...
- renewiltord 10mo ago
  That's not face recognition. That's face detection. It just detects faces and sticks a label from a pre-selected list. Come on, this doesn't even pass the basic smell test. "Facial recognition" my ass. It doesn't recognize anyone. I could build this in a cave with scraps. There's a huge difference between the two: recognition means you have found a known person, detection means you found a person. That's about the difference between eating sodium chloride and eating sodium.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - marcellus23 10mo ago
    You're right but I don't understand why you're so hostile about it. At any rate, it's still making the same point regardless.
    - renewiltord 10mo ago
      This kind of privacy slop is overly popular in tech circles. Each participant just posts uninformed garbage and then they link to each other with “citations” for sources that are wholly made up. It’s really reducing the quality of information on this website that it’s now full of junior engineers and interns. Those guys always obsess over CVEs and privacy and they’re always wrong about everything but have learned to mimic the language of people who know stuff. “There’s some evidence” / “here’s a source”. Ugh. Can’t stand it.
iris-digital 10mo ago
I'd like to start a standard marking of some sort to call them out. A hot pink arrow drawn with spray paint on the pole is the first thing that came to mind.
tefkah 10mo ago
damn that’s a good idea
basch 10mo ago
I see a meeting tonight in a neighboring city with a council recommendation of approve. Timely
calvinmorrison 10mo ago
A better "art project" would be a alpr that detects police and municipal vehicles and reports them to a map criminals and citizens alike can see
hopelite 10mo ago
Joke's on you... even most EVs watch everyone and everything that they pass/passes them. Walking through the parking lot ... face recognition. Welcome to prison planet, the silly conspiracy theory that only weirdos believe in 1990.
- DANmode 10mo ago
  …wait, what about 1990?
  - IAmBroom 10mo ago
    I don't think it's that year in particular, but lots of spy movies from that era include bits like "Show me the feed from cameras in that area... OK, zoom in on that guy in the black hood... ID him!". In real time. And then the agents run out of the office and get to that part of the city in a couple minutes, as if they were in Mayberry instead of NYC.
  - hopelite 10mo ago
    It was a bit of an arbitrary year, but I chose it because that seemed to be a kind of event horizon as the www and internet bubble, aka fraud, would start heating in that period to the crescendo in 99. It was a bit of an early time when previous "conspiracy theorists" of the pre-digital era were starting to pick up on what the government and organizations were doing and saying, largely because they had experiences and connections to people in the government and military; and were starting to "sound the alarm" about thing that digital things would really enable for the first time in human history... the figurative panopticon of surveillance and totalitarianism, which we are arguably already in, and are definitely heading towards, even though it is not apparent to regular people by design. As with the story in 1984, the first order of operations for the Party, was to hide and obscure and obfuscate the creeping and enveloping psychological control that the protagonist was momentarily able to break free of. Just to put it into perspective, not a single of Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day worst regimes of the 20th century were even able to dream about just the depth and breadth of surveillance and control that basically all regimes of the whole west hat already implemented at this point, let alone are actively and aggressively implementing. Sure, they haven't started. murdering people in overt ways, but they have already started doing so on the small scale and covertly. Those were all things that people were starting to connect the dots about in around the 1990s as networking/www and technology was starting to come into maturity. Arguably, I could have also said the 2000s, but it's only ever gotten worse with every decade, so it seems more relevant to identify a kind of change over, not an incremental evolution.
rsync 10mo ago
"... and paint QR codes on the ground at those spots ..." This is what "Oh By Codes"[1] are for. Instead of trying to paint a QR code, which is difficult, you can just chalk a 6 character code. Further, you can create them on the fly without using a special tool - just a textarea on a simple webpage. You can encode up to 4096 characters or a single URL redirect. [1] https://0x.co https://0x.co
- achierius 10mo ago
  But people's phones will scan a QR code from the camera: they're much more likely to do that then type in a URL while walking.
  - rsync 10mo ago
    That's certainly true - hence the extremely (almost minimally) short '0x.co' URL. It's certainly not for every use-case ...
- hamburglar 10mo ago
  So 0x.co is tinyurl for strings?
  - rsync 10mo ago
    Oh By is an “everything shortener”.
    - IAmBroom 10mo ago
      Well, it's a lookup table, limited to 6^N, where N is the number of legal characters (printable ASCII?).
- cinntaile 10mo ago
  You can't scan them like a QR-code, which is kind of the point?
- ihaveone 10mo ago
imglorp 10mo ago
There's probably several interesting ways to make a QR code on the ground with chalk. I'm thinking of a turtle bot loaded with spray chalk, for starters. And this post uses wire screen to make a stencil https://www.instructables.com/Simple-QR-Code-Spray-Paint-Stencil/ https://www.instructables.com/Simple-QR-Code-Spray-Paint-Ste...
nemo1618 10mo ago
Years ago there was a YouTuber, "Surveillance Camera Man," who went around pointing a camera at people with no pretense. Frequently the subjects were upset by this and became aggressive, even violent. I believe the intended message was that this is a natural and justified reaction to being surveilled, and yet there is little outcry because public surveillance is largely invisible and/or faceless (e.g. just a CCTV camera mounted on a building, rather than a stranger invading your personal space). The YouTube account is no longer around, but you can still watch it on archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20190220131525/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mP5ZVPwP7bg https://web.archive.org/web/20190220131525/https://www.youtu...
- xmprt 10mo ago
  My take on that is that they're different situations because a CCTV camera has 1000s of hours of footage to scrub through and will likely only be looked at if/when something bad happens. Whereas the guy pointing a camera at me probably only has a couple hours which means I'm likely relevant to the cameraman (ie, I'll go into that final video) whereas I'm not that relevant to the CCTV. I know more recent cameras are using AI analysis to constantly track and catalog people which is more worrying but the old school surveillance cameras don't bother me as much. I like the OP's idea for an art project more because it's showing your what is really happening (rather than convincing people that filming someone on a 4k camera is the same as CCTV surveillance) - CCTV cameras are constantly monitoring and many can be publicly accessed.
  - khannn 10mo ago
    If you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to hide
    - xmprt 10mo ago
      I don't even think that is the best defense because it takes a very passive acceptance to it. On the flip side, if someone steal my bike or assaults me in public, I'd like there to be some accountability which would otherwise never happen (and vice versa). In the past, if a white lady were to accuse a black man of some crime, then it was practically impossible to fight it. With CCTV, you can prove innocence and guilt a lot more conclusively.

by fainpul 10mo ago

jdthedisciple 10mo ago

What, are those streams publicly accessible? I'm only aware of boring rooftop weather webcams where obv you can't see yourself. Any examples for what you speak of?

peaseagee 10mo ago
Many are! I live in NY and 511ny.org has a great view of all traffic cams in the state (and some beyond it, but I don't understand how they got on the list...)
- maccard 10mo ago
  https://trafficcamphotobooth.com/ https://trafficcamphotobooth.com/ You can even take a selfie with them!
gs17 10mo ago
Some places have them available. For example, every highway camera in California (and in some places like Oakland there's plenty of cameras that show crosswalks): https://cwwp2.dot.ca.gov/vm/iframemap.htm https://cwwp2.dot.ca.gov/vm/iframemap.htm Quality isn't great, but you could likely see yourself recognizably.
fainpul 10mo ago
I don't mean these Flock cameras, I mean what you refer to as "boring rooftop weather webcams". Some of those show people fairly close up and even if you can't recognize your face in the stream, you will recognize the place and realize that it's you, standing there right now in that video stream. Just search for "<your city> webcam" and see what you can find.

FelipeCortez 10mo ago

I remember seeing an art project in the UK ~10 years ago where they had actors enact a short film but everything was filmed using street cameras, which IIRC everyone could request access to with little bureaucracy.

FelipeCortez 10mo ago
found it! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faceless_(2007_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faceless_(2007_film)
- rcxdude 10mo ago
  I remember a music video with the same premise: https://youtube.com/watch?v=W2iuZMEEs_A https://youtube.com/watch?v=W2iuZMEEs_A

geoffeg 10mo ago

Could use projectors to display the feed directly onto the ground or a building wall, in some ways that may be more impactful. You'd have to stay with the projector and power source, but easier to move to the next location, and less of a chance of getting in trouble for defacing public property, etc.

rvloock 10mo ago

Belgian artist Dries Depoorter has something that comes close, where he tried to match public webcams against Instagram photos. See https://driesdepoorter.be/thefollower https://driesdepoorter.be/thefollower .

p_ing 10mo ago

I had thought about creating a larger roadside banner with the faces (pulled from voters guide) of the city council members who approved Flock, along with the face of the Sheriff with something along the lines of "These people want to know where your wife and daughter are at all times - deflock.me" and place it right next to the Flock camera. Gotta tag some political organization on the banner which makes it illegal to remove.

arijun 10mo ago
I wonder if it’s legal to modify the images to look more sinister. Otherwise, someone passing by might not read the text, making it free advertising for council/sherrif.
- afavour 10mo ago
  Feels like a dishonest approach, to be honest.
edot 10mo ago
The issue is, a lot of people wouldn’t mind the sheriff knowing where their wife and daughter are at all times. What if one of them gets kidnapped? It would be good if law enforcement could track them. That’s the logic some people have …
- IAmBroom 10mo ago
  It's not illogical to say that more cameras would lead to more arrests of kidnappers, and other violent criminals. I don't think many of us would object to video surveillance actually doing that. So, it's not even an immoral thought to many of us. The problem is LE using it for almost any other purpose whatsoever.
  - ejplatzer 10mo ago
    This would be a potential point of conversation if the research didn't show that more ALPRs doesn't lead to reduced crime or more arrests - except in the very narrow slice of automotive theft.

allenu 10mo ago

Not exactly the same, but Massive Attack had some facial recognition software running in the background during a concert to illustrate how pervasive modern day surveillance is: https://petapixel.com/2025/09/17/band-massive-attack-uses-live-facial-recognition-on-audience-in-powerful-critique-of-technology/ https://petapixel.com/2025/09/17/band-massive-attack-uses-li...

renewiltord 10mo ago
That's not face recognition. That's face detection. It just detects faces and sticks a label from a pre-selected list. Come on, this doesn't even pass the basic smell test. "Facial recognition" my ass. It doesn't recognize anyone. I could build this in a cave with scraps. There's a huge difference between the two: recognition means you have found a known person, detection means you found a person. That's about the difference between eating sodium chloride and eating sodium.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- marcellus23 10mo ago
  You're right but I don't understand why you're so hostile about it. At any rate, it's still making the same point regardless.
  - renewiltord 10mo ago
    This kind of privacy slop is overly popular in tech circles. Each participant just posts uninformed garbage and then they link to each other with “citations” for sources that are wholly made up. It’s really reducing the quality of information on this website that it’s now full of junior engineers and interns. Those guys always obsess over CVEs and privacy and they’re always wrong about everything but have learned to mimic the language of people who know stuff. “There’s some evidence” / “here’s a source”. Ugh. Can’t stand it.

iris-digital 10mo ago

I'd like to start a standard marking of some sort to call them out. A hot pink arrow drawn with spray paint on the pole is the first thing that came to mind.

tefkah 10mo ago

damn that’s a good idea

basch 10mo ago

I see a meeting tonight in a neighboring city with a council recommendation of approve. Timely

calvinmorrison 10mo ago

A better "art project" would be a alpr that detects police and municipal vehicles and reports them to a map criminals and citizens alike can see

hopelite 10mo ago

Joke's on you... even most EVs watch everyone and everything that they pass/passes them. Walking through the parking lot ... face recognition. Welcome to prison planet, the silly conspiracy theory that only weirdos believe in 1990.

DANmode 10mo ago
…wait, what about 1990?
- IAmBroom 10mo ago
  I don't think it's that year in particular, but lots of spy movies from that era include bits like "Show me the feed from cameras in that area... OK, zoom in on that guy in the black hood... ID him!". In real time. And then the agents run out of the office and get to that part of the city in a couple minutes, as if they were in Mayberry instead of NYC.
- hopelite 10mo ago
  It was a bit of an arbitrary year, but I chose it because that seemed to be a kind of event horizon as the www and internet bubble, aka fraud, would start heating in that period to the crescendo in 99. It was a bit of an early time when previous "conspiracy theorists" of the pre-digital era were starting to pick up on what the government and organizations were doing and saying, largely because they had experiences and connections to people in the government and military; and were starting to "sound the alarm" about thing that digital things would really enable for the first time in human history... the figurative panopticon of surveillance and totalitarianism, which we are arguably already in, and are definitely heading towards, even though it is not apparent to regular people by design. As with the story in 1984, the first order of operations for the Party, was to hide and obscure and obfuscate the creeping and enveloping psychological control that the protagonist was momentarily able to break free of. Just to put it into perspective, not a single of Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day worst regimes of the 20th century were even able to dream about just the depth and breadth of surveillance and control that basically all regimes of the whole west hat already implemented at this point, let alone are actively and aggressively implementing. Sure, they haven't started. murdering people in overt ways, but they have already started doing so on the small scale and covertly. Those were all things that people were starting to connect the dots about in around the 1990s as networking/www and technology was starting to come into maturity. Arguably, I could have also said the 2000s, but it's only ever gotten worse with every decade, so it seems more relevant to identify a kind of change over, not an incremental evolution.

rsync 10mo ago

"... and paint QR codes on the ground at those spots ..." This is what "Oh By Codes"[1] are for. Instead of trying to paint a QR code, which is difficult, you can just chalk a 6 character code. Further, you can create them on the fly without using a special tool - just a textarea on a simple webpage. You can encode up to 4096 characters or a single URL redirect. [1] https://0x.co https://0x.co

achierius 10mo ago
But people's phones will scan a QR code from the camera: they're much more likely to do that then type in a URL while walking.
- rsync 10mo ago
  That's certainly true - hence the extremely (almost minimally) short '0x.co' URL. It's certainly not for every use-case ...
hamburglar 10mo ago
So 0x.co is tinyurl for strings?
- rsync 10mo ago
  Oh By is an “everything shortener”.
  - IAmBroom 10mo ago
    Well, it's a lookup table, limited to 6^N, where N is the number of legal characters (printable ASCII?).
cinntaile 10mo ago
You can't scan them like a QR-code, which is kind of the point?
ihaveone 10mo ago

imglorp 10mo ago

There's probably several interesting ways to make a QR code on the ground with chalk. I'm thinking of a turtle bot loaded with spray chalk, for starters. And this post uses wire screen to make a stencil https://www.instructables.com/Simple-QR-Code-Spray-Paint-Stencil/ https://www.instructables.com/Simple-QR-Code-Spray-Paint-Ste...

nemo1618 10mo ago

Years ago there was a YouTuber, "Surveillance Camera Man," who went around pointing a camera at people with no pretense. Frequently the subjects were upset by this and became aggressive, even violent. I believe the intended message was that this is a natural and justified reaction to being surveilled, and yet there is little outcry because public surveillance is largely invisible and/or faceless (e.g. just a CCTV camera mounted on a building, rather than a stranger invading your personal space). The YouTube account is no longer around, but you can still watch it on archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20190220131525/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mP5ZVPwP7bg https://web.archive.org/web/20190220131525/https://www.youtu...

xmprt 10mo ago
My take on that is that they're different situations because a CCTV camera has 1000s of hours of footage to scrub through and will likely only be looked at if/when something bad happens. Whereas the guy pointing a camera at me probably only has a couple hours which means I'm likely relevant to the cameraman (ie, I'll go into that final video) whereas I'm not that relevant to the CCTV. I know more recent cameras are using AI analysis to constantly track and catalog people which is more worrying but the old school surveillance cameras don't bother me as much. I like the OP's idea for an art project more because it's showing your what is really happening (rather than convincing people that filming someone on a 4k camera is the same as CCTV surveillance) - CCTV cameras are constantly monitoring and many can be publicly accessed.
- khannn 10mo ago
  If you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to hide
  - xmprt 10mo ago
    I don't even think that is the best defense because it takes a very passive acceptance to it. On the flip side, if someone steal my bike or assaults me in public, I'd like there to be some accountability which would otherwise never happen (and vice versa). In the past, if a white lady were to accuse a black man of some crime, then it was practically impossible to fight it. With CCTV, you can prove innocence and guilt a lot more conclusively.